There were other people coming along the path toward them. He drew her arm through his again and turned toward them. There were two couples. The men inclined their heads and touched the brims of their hats. The ladies half curtsied.
“Netherby,” Lord Safford said. “This is a fine day for May.”
“Your Grace,” both ladies murmured.
But all eyes, Avery was fully aware, were upon his companion, avid and curious.
“Yes, is it not?” Avery agreed with a sigh, his quizzing glass in his free hand.
“It is warm but not overhot,” one of the ladies said. “It is perfect for a stroll in the park.”
“And there is no wind,” the other lady added, “which is most unusual and very welcome.”
“Quite so,” Avery agreed. “Cousin, may I present Lord and Lady Safford and Mr. Marley and Miss James? Lady Anastasia Westcott is the daughter of the late Earl of Riverdale.”
“How do you do?” Anna said, looking directly at each of them in turn.
The gentlemen bowed and the ladies curtsied—to her, not to Avery this time.
“This is a great pleasure, Lady Anastasia,” Mr. Marley said as Miss James’s eyes moved over her from head to toe. “I hope we will see more of you during the Season.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I have no firm plans yet.”
Avery raised his glass partway to his eye, and the two couples took the hint and moved off after some murmured farewells.
“You do realize, Anna, I hope,” Avery said as they resumed their own walk along the path in the opposite direction, “that you have just made their day.”
“Have I?” she said. “Because I am so dowdy? Because I am impossible?”
“For precisely those reasons,” he said, turning his head and regarding her lazily. “You can continue being dowdy if you wish or allow yourself to be decked out in all the latest fashions and finery. And you can remain impossible or prove that to a lady of character all things are possible. You may even, the next time you are bowed and scraped to, choose to acknowledge the homage with a gracious inclination of the head and a cool glance along the length of your nose.”
“How absurd,” she said.
“Quite so,” he agreed. “But behaving thus helps keep pretension and impertinence at bay.”
“Is that why you do it, then?” she asked.
Ah.
“I do it,” he said, “because I am Netherby and am expected to be toplofty. Your relatives, Anna, will urge you to become Lady Anastasia Westcott to the exclusion of all else. The ton will certainly expect it of you. The four persons who just passed us have probably broken into a trot by now in their haste to spread the word about their first encounter with you. Their listeners will be fascinated and envious and scandalized and desperate to see you for themselves. The choice of whether you change and how much you change will be yours to make.”
“And what would you advise, Avery?” she asked, and he was encouraged to hear the slight edge in her voice.
He shuddered with deliberate theatricality. “My dear Anna,” he said, “if there is something I never, ever do, it is offer advice. The tedium of it! Why would it matter to me whether you turn yourself into a diamond of the first water—that ghastly cliché—or remain a happy, dowdy teacher of orphans?”
“Perhaps,” she suggested, “a dowdy teacher of orphans would offend your sense of consequence, since you have a connection to me through your stepmother.” She turned her head to look at him, and yes, she was angry. She had a bit of a stubborn jaw too.
“Ah,” he said faintly, “but I never allow anything or anyone to reduce my sense of consequence.”
“And neither,” she said, “do I.”
Their eyes met. “A knockout line,” he said. “My compliments, Anna.”
“I will change,” she told him. They had come to a stop again at a break in the trees that afforded a view across a grassy expanse to the Serpentine in the distance. “One cannot live from one day into the next without changing. It is the nature of life. Small choices are always necessary even when large ones do not loom. I will change what I choose to change and retain what I choose to retain. I will even listen to advice since it is foolish not to, provided the adviser has something of value to say. But I will not choose between Anna and Lady Anastasia, for I am both. I merely have to decide, one choice at a time, how I will somehow reconcile the two without rejecting either. “
He smiled slowly at her, and she bit her lower lip.
“I do believe, Anna,” he said, “that I may well fall in love with you. It would be a novel experience, but then, you are a novel experience. So earnest and so . . . principled. What do you choose, then, for the next moment? Shall we walk on? Or shall I kiss you?”
He said it to shock her, but he shocked himself at least equally. There were women with whom he flirted, and there were women with whom he most definitely did not. Anna fit quite firmly into the second category.
He watched shock wash over her and kept a wary eye on her right hand, assuming she was right-handed. Her nostrils flared.
“We will walk on,” she said. “If this is how a gentleman and an aristocrat speaks to a lady, Avery, then I do not think much of a gentleman’s education.”
“There are not many ladies,” he said, his expression and his voice restored to their habitual ennui, “who would be outraged by the offer of a kiss from the Duke of Netherby. How humbling your rejection would be, Anna, if I were capable of humility. We will, as you say, continue on our way, then. We must return to Westcott House soon if we do not want Lady Matilda Westcott and the new Earl of Riverdale to send out in search of you.”